Amazon can't yet completely delete Alexa voice transcriptions

So like probably the majority of useful text boxes everyone types into on the internet. Great news, thanks for the info

So, for me, it is a glorified cooking timer and alarm clock. If I could buy a closed unit that just did that, then I would be happy.

Gimmicks are short-lived for fundamental reasons. I'm going to sound like a broken record but, as someone who has owned multiple Alexa devices and quit their job to start a voice-UI business(didn't pan out), the current generation of "smart speakers" are a joke when it comes to doing anything serious besides asking for the weather or toggling light switches. I have no doubt that they are useful to people in very limited ways, but they are still sold as being a lot smarter than they really are. For what they provide, the privacy trade-off is too great for me.

Alexa is a gimmick because it's a speech-to-text command line, and it's sold as being smart even though it's not. Since before I was a kid in the 90s, there have been many attempts to revolutionize computing with speech-to-text technology. Because speaking comes so naturally to us, it's easy to assume that voice-activated anything is better than pushing buttons. In reality, without intelligence and autonomy, lots of interfaces are made slightly worse with voice activation. For those who aren't visually impaired, the ability to use voice to turn off lights barely even makes sense. Alexa frequently gets things wrong and activates from sounds that aren't even close to the wake-word. The ability to create lists is barely practical because it so often can't understand a word, in which case the user has to go to the Alexa app and manually punch in the item.

Voice control would be great if it were revolutionized, but it's hardly in a different state than it was decades ago. The only two things that have changed are improved speech synthesis and ample cloud computing. Because of this, most people I know who own one barely use them beyond a select number of features that are hard to get wrong like "Alexa, what's the weather?" or "Alexa, what time is it?". My parents still sometimes use it to play music(which I gave up on as a music fan), but it gets requests hilariously wrong 1/5 times.

"Besides [a bunch of useful stuff], Alexa is useless! Therefore it's a gimmick."

I have an Echo Dot which I use almost exclusively for a few static purposes: the weather, setting alarms, turning my lights on and off, and asking what time it is.

I also ask it basic questions like whether various sports teams won or what time they're playing, which it also answers well.

Not sure why you think it is useless just because it's not a magical general AI that can do everything.

I find it extremely useful.

> For those who aren't visually impaired, the ability to use voice to turn off lights barely even makes sense

I'm not visually impaired and I use this feature all the time. It allows me to turn off the light when reading in bed without having to get up and walk to the light switch.

> most people I know who own one barely use them beyond a select number of features that are hard to get wrong

Yeah, exactly. How does this make it useless?

In that case every computer interface is controlled by things you’re born with.